Phoronix, known for their various speed tests and reviews, compared the latest in Ubuntu and what, until recently, used to be the lastest in Mac OS X with 29 different benchmarking tests. Some of the results were rather interesting.

I too saw those marks and interesting how you ignore the follow up which explained why some of them were the result of the default configuration as with the case of the MySQL benchmark. It has nothing to do with micro versus monolithic versus hybrid versus chocolate bar with sprinkles on top.

Mac OS X was designed first and foremost as highly responsive desktop operating system. There are sacrifices when you focus on latency and responsiveness over throughput; and yes, when it comes to responsiveness, Linux doesn't even come close to Mac OS X. If I counted the number of times my netbook came bogged down and poorly responsive with a couple of applications open versus Windows on the same machine - I'd be here all day.

Until 10.4.x, Mac OS X was never interactively responsive for me. I know that was the intention but it never happened, even on dual processor machines. My Ubuntu machine feels better but even that has some odd performance foibles.